I'm going be contrarian here and suggest that this is going to come back into fashion (at least for hackers).

What the author says is true, for a lot of 'old' people their memory of their first computer is intimately linked with the notion that "nobody but me and maybe a handful of my friends had one." I was in a computer club in Las Vegas growing up and there is a picture of me and the Digital Group Z80 based computer I built in the newspaper, I was called out as the youngest person in Nevada who had 'built their own computer.'[1] But really it was the that "computers" were these things you couldn't easily get too and here I had one of my very own. That was awe inspiring.

We've gone through an amazing period of growth, and during that time seen a tremendous amount of change in what folks think of as a 'personal computer.' and starting around the turn of the century things started changing. People got computers who could care less that they were computers, they needed them as tools to get something done, whether it was computing the variance p on a set of measurements, or balancing the books of a corporation, or putting together a flyer for the next newspaper insert. For these folks, who grossly outnumber the 'techno' folks, the fact that all this 'computerness' was exposed made problems for them. I clearly remember a friend of my Dad's who bellowed "I don't need a god damn computer science degree to draw, I've been doing that since was was six!"

That level of pain has made 'ease of use' and 'appliance' salable features of devices which use computation and software to help folks do their jobs. The finally flipped completely over in the 'smartphone' which we all know is a computer but for millions it is a phone first, a camera second, maybe a pager third. There are people with an iPhone or Android phone in their pocket and will tell you with a straight face "I don't own a computer, I get everything I need done with my phone."

Hold on to that thought, they don't own a 'computer.' The thing they have lets them access stuff like the web and call people and take pictures, it isn't that thing you write programs for.

Now that seems like a game of semantics, and initially it really was indistinguishable from such a game, but the fact that 'computerness' was such a non-issue to these people that it becomes something that can be removed, and if it saves money to remove it, it gets removed with extreme prejudice. I expect my kids will have a 'phone' for carrying around and a 'tablet' for composing emails and stuff and they won't have a 'computer.' And that brings us around full circle.

So their kids will have a strong association with the first technology device they got which let them change the way it worked in anyway they wanted, it was a 'computer', not your padd or TV or web viewer thing, this thing you could design programs for and it ran them, what ever you thought up, bam you could make it happen. And the cycle will continue. As they get older they will tell stories about the first computer they got and bore the crap out of people who have been printing circuits on their 3D printers or what not.

[1] This wasn't true, I was the youngest member of the club but there were other kids in Nevada who had built computers by the summer of 1978.